


Slowly Tumbling

by SimplexityJane



Series: Coldflash Week 2016 [5]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: ColdFlash Week 2016, Hopeful Ending, Kid Fic, M/M, Michael Snart - Freeform, well sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-10
Updated: 2016-12-10
Packaged: 2018-09-07 14:51:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8805130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SimplexityJane/pseuds/SimplexityJane
Summary: She didn't look like her father, Barry thought, up until Michelle Snart looked at him.In which Leonard Snart gets acquitted for a very good reason, people are really weird in the future about wearing leather and becoming vigilantes, and Barry Allen doesn't create Flashpoint.Written for Coldflash Week Day Seven, Domestic.





	

**Author's Note:**

> There is some murder mentioned in this fic. I would love to write about Michelle Snart's kickass mom, but no one would read that except for me, so she's at least getting a mention here, even though her name isn't mentioned (it's Carla).

When Barry first saw her outside the courthouse, he didn’t think she looked much like Snart. She was lighter than Iris, her dark hair curling down her shoulders in little-girl ringlets that she fidgeted with, and she actually _smiled_. Michelle Snart didn’t look much like Leonard Snart, until she looked at Barry and her eyes went narrow.

Metahuman, he knew, Lewis had said, something to do with shadows, something he didn’t totally understand, but he hadn’t expected such a piercing gaze from a _ten-year-old_. Her eyes were just like Snart’s, too, saw too much, knew too much about him immediately. He had the uncomfortable feeling this little girl knew his secret identity at first glance. His suspicions were only confirmed when she took her father’s hand, imperious in a way that he _should_ have expected but hadn’t, and dragged him over.

“You’re _him_ ,” she said. “You saved Auntie Lisa’s life.”

“Cisco did that, actually,” Snart corrected, but he… was he fighting a smile? He was. Barry had known for a long time – since shortly after Ferris Air, actually – that there was good in Leonard Snart, but he hadn’t expected to _see it_.

The world brought to its knees by a little girl’s declaration, it seemed.

“The Flash helped him.” She kept her voice low, at least. “He saved you from… from…”

And Snart looked like he was about to pick her up then and there, reporters be damned. It was the story of the year, that notorious (alleged, the lawyer was big on that) thief Leonard Snart had a kid. The papers were all sympathetic to him, even Iris spinning a story about Lewis Snart’s abuse and threats against Lisa and little Michelle. He had killed Michelle’s mother when he got out of prison, just… like she was nothing, took a little girl’s mother away from her and then used her as leverage against her father. Barry felt an uncomfortable kinship with the girl. Eobard Thawne would have approved of Lewis, he was sure.

“He did,” Snart said. He was nodding, and Michelle tugged on a lock of hair again. That was something similar, too, the way their hands were always moving. Barry had thought maybe it was because Snart had started picking pockets young enough to ingrain the habit forever, but maybe not. “Kiddo, we have to go now. You can see Barry later, okay?”

Michelle nodded, blinking tears that trailed down too quietly for a little girl, and Barry almost flinched. There was something wrong about a kid being so quiet. They disappeared into the back of a car, and Joe came up to him with a frown on his face.

“You okay, Barr? This thing with Snart…” He shook his head.

“He was acquitted for a pretty good reason, Joe. If someone threatened Iris or me, what would you do?” It was weird thinking about Snart as a dad, let alone a dad like Joe – but there were what, less than five years between them? Joe used his experience as an example as to why safe sex was important when they were teenagers, but...

But Snart _was_ a dad, and a good one. Joe tilted his shoulder, acknowledging how true it was that Lewis Snart would have been just as much of a popsicle if it had been Joe. Barry flashed suddenly to Oliver, to Moira Queen on the television, going along with a plan to kill _a city_ because her kids were in danger. Barry was glad he wasn’t a parent, because the thought of fighting like that, with so much at stake, made him a little nauseated. He had metahumans from another earth trying to kill him. If he’d had a kid, it would have been so much harder to fight.

He hoped he would have fought harder for them, but he was happy _not_ to know, honestly.

The next time he saw Michelle was at Christmas, after he found out that _Oliver had a kid_ , and wow, did every guy he knew somehow have children? She was drinking cocoa with Snart on his couch, she with the Santa mug, Snart with the reindeer that matched his expression when he looked at Barry.

“We were practicing lock picking,” he said. “You don’t have mini marshmallows, by the way. You should fix that.”

Michelle rolled her eyes at Snart and grinned up at Barry.

“Dad wanted to warn you about Mark Mardon ruining Christmas. You should’ve called him the Grinch, not something cool like Weather Wizard.” She sipped her cocoa. “I don’t like mini marshmallows.”

“I’m getting another paternity test.” Snart shook his head, and Michelle giggled into her drink. Iris snorted, and Barry fought the urge to groan and ask when this had become his life.

He had been struck by lightning and got superpowers, he reminded himself. Having his… former?... arch nemesis in his living room, gently ribbing his daughter about her bad taste in chocolate drinks and joking with his best-friend-and-sort-of-sister about breaking and entering didn’t stand up to that. Did it?

Iris’s boyfriend had died and come back to life after creating a grandfather paradox and opening up a black hole, and now they were probably the progenitors of his future-and-past-arch-enemy. This was definitely not as weird as that.

Snart was smart bringing Michelle along, though. He could obviously see Barry’s urge to throw him into a wall. Barry’s good sense and manners prevented that, though, even when Snart refused to help them stop Mardon. He had his own kid to look after, and Barry flashed back to Moira Queen, willing to damn a thousand children for two. That was apparently what parents did, and Barry didn’t know if it was selfish or selfless or something else entirely.

Between Zoom and his father and everything else, time passed so fast it seemed like it was flying. His heart hurt, and he didn’t know what to do, and he heard Thawne’s words in his head, that he would never truly be happy, never truly be at peace.

He didn’t know if it was coincidence or fate or just really, _really_ weird timing, but Snart showing up at STAR Labs with Stein and Jax in tow, along with half a dozen other people – including Heatwave, which made Caitlin flinch – made him pause. Cisco had talked about how Snart had disappeared, left Michelle with Lisa just in case. Oliver had told Barry that Snart was going time travelling to save the world, though he had phrased it as a question, not a statement. He’d heard about Rip Hunter from Eobard Thawne once, too.

Seeing how _changed_ everyone was, he believed his friends when they told him he was different after the trips he’d taken in time. This wasn’t because of the timeline, though. This was something that had aged everyone here, and Ray cheerfully talked about 1958 like that would be nice for _anyone_.

“It was for the straight white guy,” Jax said when Barry asked about that. Probably partially Sara’s influence, but Barry raised a mocking toast and was joined by Cisco, Iris, Joe, Sara, Mick Rory, and Snart. “Before you start, Gray, I get that it was bad for Jewish people, too. I’ve got a few black Jewish cousins, too, and Grandma Annie used to take us all to temple.”

While Stein was talking about how that had clearly been one of the reasons their Firestorm matrix was so strong – Barry wasn’t touching that one with a ten-foot pole – Snart pulled out his phone. Mick was talking quietly with Caitlin, possibly apologizing, and Cisco was flirting with Sara because he had a type, and Barry wondered how many people he met could actually kill them with a high heeled shoe.

“Come to STAR Labs, okay?” Snart was saying. “I’ll see you. Bye, Lisa.” He raised an eyebrow at Barry, who shrugged.

“Pretty sure she’s going to kill you,” Barry offered.

“Well, I already died once, and it didn’t take. If I can survive the Time Masters, I think I _might_ be able to survive my sister. If I have numbers on my side, at least.” Snart smiled at Barry, and even though it was small, it was real. “You haven’t said ‘I told you so’ yet.”

Snart smiling like that made the weirdest thought cross Barry’s mind. It was almost an impulse, flying away seconds after he thought it.

He wanted to kiss Leonard Snart.

“I was planning on saving it for later, actually. Preferably in front of everyone we’ve ever met, just for maximum embarrassment potential.” And yep, he had absolutely no game if that was his idea of flirting. And it was. Because, again, _no game_.

“I look forward to it,” Snart – Leonard? Len? _Leo_? No, definitely not Leo – said. “I’ll invite you to the next supervillain conference when it’s in town. You can be my plus one.”

Before Barry could figure out if Leonard was flirting back, Lisa and Michelle burst on the scene. Everyone on the Legends team looked away, and Barry felt his eyebrows twitch. He couldn’t watch the reunion without possibly joining the little kid in tears in front of him, so he walked over to Sara and Cisco, who were playing a drinking game.

“We met a possible future her,” Sara explained. “She ran around with Sara and John Diggle Junior in a skintight suit calling herself Shadow Walker. Pretty sure that’s why Len’s not going to come back with us to the Waverider, actually. If she has to be a superhero, he has some idea about staying in Central because it’s their city.” She shrugged.

Barry blinked at that, both the information about a possible future where Diggle and Lyla had another kid – which would be great – and at the fact that Leonard – Len – was staying in 2016.

“I bet I named her in that possible future, because that name is awesome,” Cisco said. “Now it’s a causality loop, obviously, but so was Reverse-Flash, and we ran with that too.”

“Yeah, well, there are probably gonna be more of those with the Oculus gone.” Sara frowned and pinched the bridge of her nose. “And more speedsters. That’s why Rip wouldn’t come. Apparently Time Masters and speedsters get along as well as time wraiths do with idiots.” Sara rolled her eyes, and Barry and Cisco shared a look, creating a silent pact to never, ever tell the Legends about the time wraith.

Len had picked Michelle up, even though she was too big for that, really, tall for a ten-year-old, and he and Lisa were talking in low voices. His eyes glanced over at Barry every once in a while, though, and he was still smiling at him.

Barry reminded himself that Len had a kid, and that Barry had been _glad_ not to be a parent when he was fighting Zoom. No matter how much he might want to kiss Len, he was inherently a package deal, and Barry wasn’t the type of bastard who led people on like that. So he would have to ignore everything in his gut.

The Snarts migrated closer to the STAR Labs team, and Barry frowned when he saw that Michelle was doing something… weird. There were toys in her hands, and they would disappear like they hadn’t even been there. When Len put her down she pulled out ten model cars and trucks and started playing with them. She was using her powers to do it. She made them do tricks where they disappeared and reappeared.

“That’s pretty cool,” Barry found himself saying. Michelle looked up at him and then glanced at her father, smiling and giggling. Barry knew, suddenly, that he had made a mistake. “Please don’t make a pun out of…”

“Dad’s the cool one, Barry,” Michelle said. “I have to practice, or I lose things in the shadows. Do you lose things in the lightning?”

“Sometimes I go so fast I hit things, but no, I haven’t lost anything in the… lightning. It’s actually something called the speed force. It just looks – and feels – like lightning.”

“It changed your shadow,” Michelle said matter-of-factly. “It’s all _light_ , now. It’s different from other people’s.”

Barry nodded. He wasn’t sure exactly what the _shadows_ actually were – probably just a term she used to describe how she experienced her powers, but then again, he had _literally communed_ with the speed force while he was _dead_ , so it could be something else. He had never met a metahuman as young as Michelle, even though he knew it was possible.

More than possible, the part of him that was always connected to the speed force told him. Metahumans would be born that way soon. He swallowed, thinking about that. People would never understand it. It was gonna _suck_.

The Snarts left early, mostly because ten-year-olds needed to go to bed early. Barry nodded his goodbyes, and he didn’t let his eyes linger on Len. He had practice with Iris, after all, and these feelings weren’t even as strong as those, and besides, were dulled by the grief swamping over him with every breath he took.

The speed force had asked him why he’d abandoned it, and that was apparently something from the multi-universal Barry Allens out there, not himself. He didn’t go back in time, as much as he wanted to. He visited his parents’ graves, because he wasn’t making that mistake for another sixteen years, not when he was an adult now, and he let himself cry. He tried not to blame himself for them both, especially his father, but he remembered the him of the future shaking his head at the Barry in the past – he would become that, someday. Eobard Thawne would be back, whether as a time remnant or whatever actually happened in the universe that they didn’t understand well enough to explain, and they would end up back at that point.

Iris and Eddie’s wedding wasn’t as bittersweet as it could have been. At least there wasn’t any weird ‘Man of Honor’ stuff, him standing as Iris’s Best Man because they’d been best friends for so long it was hard to remember. Linda caught the bouquet, and Barry honestly tried to avoid the garter except it landed on his shoulder, and they danced, laughing the whole time. He’d never had an ex he could still laugh with, and it was nice.

The ache never went away. He knew that already, though.

When they realized Julian Albert, the new metahuman-focused CSI, was actually Dr. Alchemy – or that Dr. Alchemy was possessing him, another consciousness just like Magenta with Frankie – Barry wondered if he was supposed to be surprised. Everyone they met either turned into a superhero or a supervillain, the latter way more common than the former.

They didn’t know how to fight him, or Savitar, the metahuman calling himself a god. Caitlin and her new powers helped, and so did Len with the cold gun, semi-retired thief or no, but there was no way to stop him for long, and his powers were beyond anything Barry had ever seen before, even with Zoom. But eventually they defeated him too, setting Julian up with a therapist so he could, if not control Alchemy, learn to live with that part of himself.

Cisco got invited to a kid’s birthday party, which Barry got was a big step for his and Lisa’s relationship, he really did, but then he forced Barry to come along for backup with the ex-supervillain who had yet to give him a shovel speech.

“Honestly, he probably won’t kill you, Cisco,” Barry said while they were picking out a toy that would be appropriate for an eleven-year-old. Barry had resisted the chemistry set, because Michelle was a supervillain’s daughter and apparently a future superhero (baby John Jr. had just been born, so it seemed this, at least, was coming true), and Barry knew his tropes. Besides, she was more interested in physics than in chemistry. “I think he actually likes you.”

“See, you say that, but you have a weird relationship with Cold. You’ve got that whole frenemies thing going on, man, and that’s just not the best place to get advice from.” He picked up a bridge building kit and nodded at it. “Kid likes taking stuff apart, she’ll _love_ this from not-uncle Cisco.” When Barry laughed he added, “Don’t be jealous because I’ve got mad present-picking skills, Barry.”

“Right,” Barry said. He nodded when he made his choice, picking up a much better kit that was like Legos on steroids, and Cisco made a noise of betrayal. “This one is cooler.”

Cisco defended his choice to the death, and Michelle seemed to like them both equally. There was a definite theme to her gifts, too, mostly projects where she could make something, geared toward the technical, though Mick got her a _knife set_ , and some of the active Legends had gotten generic gifts. Sara’s gift card was probably the smartest out of all of those. Other parents’ eyebrows raised at some of the gifts – Ray’s helper bot especially, presented right after the knives which got stares and murmurs from people who had apparently been under a rock when Heatwave was a villain – and they seemed to think that the smart kid would just want books as a present.

To be fair, most people didn’t meet genius metahumans whose parents were autodidacts who would have been engineers if things had turned out differently, so Barry, at least, could understand them. He wondered if Michelle had gotten more than one Harry Potter book before, though, catching her expression in a minute time dilation when she opened that particular gift. The discreet eye roll he caught on Len’s face probably meant that that was a yes.

Eventually the kids left, and Barry wondered if he could duck out and leave Cisco to the steadily stranger conversations the Legends were having with each other. He actually liked them, weirdness and all. Also, Mick and Ray were actually cuddling now, and Barry wasn’t sure how that had even happened (he was pretty sure it started after the Oculus, though). He found himself in the kitchen, contemplating the beer that would do absolutely nothing for him. Should parents have beer in their fridges? Joe had always gone out of his way to hide the alcohol from Iris and Barry, even after he gave them the ‘if you’re ever drunk and decide to drive, I will arrest you myself, so just call me’ talk.

Maybe it didn’t mean anything. Barry got a pop instead, deciding that drinking another man’s beer just wasn’t right if it wasn’t going to do anything, and besides, not at a kid’s party, ostensibly-over or not. He leaned against the island and drank the soda, nodding at Len when he came in and pulled a bottled water from under the cabinets.

“Michelle tends to forget subtle things like gratitude for gifts, so thank you,” he said. Barry nodded, letting a smile pull at the corners of his mouth.

“Sounds familiar. Apples and trees, huh?”

And he had to take a long pull on the pop, because he was pretty sure that was the lamest small-talk he’d ever thought of in twenty-seven years of life. Len smiled and shrugged though, both actions small and contained, before he looked down at his hands. The atmosphere in the room seemed to thicken, heavy and hard to breathe through.

“I never thanked you, did I? For everything.” When Barry opened his mouth to ask what exactly he thought Barry needed to be thanked for, Len shook his head and held up his hand. “When Michelle was born, her mother decided someone like me shouldn’t be in her life except for on the holidays, and she was right. Before you appeared… Cisco called me Captain Cold. He doesn’t know how right he was. You helped me… change. Become a better man.”

Maybe he did know, Barry thought. Cisco’s powers were connected to the universe, not unlike his own speed. He thought about who Len had been back then, the first thing he’d done after he’d gotten the cold gun – the dead guard, the train derailment, how casually cruel he had been. How cold he _hadn’t_ been since then.

“You changed yourself for the better, for your daughter and for yourself,” Barry said. He believed it, too. “Good isn’t… it’s not something you are. You have to work at it, every day, even when it’s hard. And some people can never do it. Sometimes there’s something just… missing, inside them. They don’t care like you do.”

Len was smirking, but it turned wry and a little bitter when he kept looking at Barry. They were standing on the edge of something, he knew, one step in either direction as earth-shattering as the moment he’d decided to kill himself to save his family and then hadn’t had to. He could hear the conversation in the other room, muffled by the walls.

They sounded happy. Barry swallowed, and Len shook his head, muttered something under his breath. When he met Barry’s eyes again, something had been decided.

“I make dinner every Wednesday night. Well, Mick texts me directions and I follow them, and usually the fire department doesn’t have to be involved. Would you like to come over and eat with me?”

Asking if this was going to be a date… was probably a good idea, actually. Barry didn’t have kids, and he got it, had seen Joe try to date before, had heard him say once that he was a package deal. Barry liked kids, though, even if he knew that in their line of work it could end up like William, who had been used against Oliver in a plot. But that could be anyone they loved.

“Is this a friend thing, or more of a date thing?” he asked. It was the least awkward of seventy possible questions he came up with in a whole second of dilated time.

“Date.” Len smirked. “I’ll get Lisa to watch Michelle. Before you say something, this is the best plan. She might already know you, but not as anything more than the Flash.” There was some fear in his pinched expression, in the way his hands burrowed into his pockets after flinging the water bottle into the trash.

Barry nodded. That sounded like a great idea, he thought. It would be nice, new.

It felt like a beginning.


End file.
